News South Africa
This May Day, we stand in struggle and solidarity with workers across the world resisting exploitation, oppression, and austerity.
May Day is not a holiday—it is a day of rebellion. It commemorates the Haymarket martyrs, workers executed in 1886 in Chicago for demanding an eight-hour workday. They died fighting the same capitalist system that we confront today. From the mines of the DRC to the factories of China, from the farms of Mpumalanga to the gig economy of Gauteng, working-class people still endure brutal conditions so that a small elite can live in obscene luxury.
Today, global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Its contradictions grow sharper every day. Climate collapse, mass unemployment, war, genocide, pandemics, and inequality expose a system that is entirely incapable and uninterested in meeting the needs of humanity or the planet. In country after country, the ruling class clings to profit through deregulation, privatisation, and repression. South Africa is no exception.
Austerity, Hunger, Unemployment and Collapse
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s decision to reverse the VAT increase is a response to popular outrage—but it is not a concession to celebrate. The VAT hike was only one part of a larger austerity assault still fully intact. The rest of the budget continues to slash public services, freeze public sector hiring, cut funding to municipalities and SOEs, and deepen the crisis of basic service delivery.
Millions are already suffering as:
● Unemployment sits above 41% (expanded definition), with youth unemployment even higher.
● Over 20 million people live in food poverty, as hunger stalks working-class communities.
● Health and education systems are in collapse, water and electricity provision deteriorate daily, and the cost of living soars while wages stagnate.
● Privatisation and deregulation are being imposed to make public goods like energy and transport profitable for corporations, while the poor are left in the dark.
These are not policy mistakes. This is class war. The ruling elite are making the working class pay for a crisis we did not create.
Defend workers’ rights – fight the Labour Bill
This May Day, we answer SAFTU’s call for a national day of action against the proposed Labour Law Amendment Bill—a direct attack on the hard-won rights of the working class.
This bill seeks to:
● Make it easier for employers to fire workers without disciplinary hearings or just cause, especially those on probation.
● Strip workers of the right to urgently interdict unfair retrenchments.
● Undermine collective bargaining by exempting new small businesses from Bargaining Council agreements.
● Narrow the definition of unfair labour practices, denying justice for unfair promotion, demotion, or exclusion from benefits.
● Erode the right to strike by limiting protest strike certificates.
● Divide the working class through a two-tier labour regime that offers weaker protections to “higher-paid” workers.
These amendments are designed to entrench the power of capital, restore apartheid-era “hire and fire” authoritarianism, and weaken union power. They represent a counter-revolutionary attempt to roll back the historic victories of the working class and leave workers at the mercy of their bosses.
We call on every trade union, socialist organisation, community movement, student and youth formation to mobilise in active, militant rejection of this bill.
From Defensive Struggles to a Socialist Programme for Power
But we must be clear: resistance alone is not enough.
The demands of the working class—to defeat this bill, to reverse austerity, to secure jobs, wages, services and dignity—cannot be realised under capitalism. Our struggles must be linked to a socialist programme that unites the working class in every major theatre of struggle behind a common vision for political and economic power in the hands of the majority. –
This means:
● Free, quality public healthcare, education and housing, paid for by taxing the rich and ending corporate impunity.
● A mass public works programme to provide jobs while building the infrastructure and services our people need.
● Nationalising the commanding heights of the economy, including the banks, mines, farms, factories, and energy, construction and transportation industries under democratic community and worker control.
● Building worker and community assemblies that can challenge the dictatorship of capital in the workplace, the economy, and the state.
It also means building a mass workers’ party rooted in struggle, independent of the bosses and their state, to fight for a socialist South Africa and a democratic, united, socialist world.
Forward to international solidarity, forward to Socialism
Around the world—from Palestine to Nigeria, from Kenya to Argentina—working-class people are rising up. We must strengthen our internationalist bonds and build an anti-imperialist, socialist alternative to the failed and empty promises of neoliberalism and elite-led development.
This May Day, let us honour our fallen comrades not with ceremonies of remembrance and commemoration, but with resistance.
Let us march not only to defend the past, but to fight for the future—a future where the working class rules, the land is returned, the economy is planned for need, not greed, and the chains of capitalism are finally broken.
Down with the Labour Bill! Down with Austerity! Forward to Workers’ Power and Socialism! Phambili ngeMay Day yaBantu Basebenzi!
Issued by the Workers and Socialist Party and Socialist Youth Movement. – @NewsSA_Online
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